Burning Meredith

by Elizabeth Gunn

  ‘So that’s what killed him?’

  ‘If nothing else killed him first. No question. The professor says no human being could survive such a dose.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that drug,’ Mort said. ‘Never heard of it before. Is it some terrible new fad?’

  ‘No. It’s been used for years in hospitals to manage pain after surgery, and for terminal cancer patients. But that’s in carefully controlled doses administered by experts. It’s fifty to a hundred times more powerful than morphine.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ Mort said. ‘Why would anybody use anything so dangerous?

  ‘Because it’s very efficient and it’s got something I never thought about before – a wide therapeutic index. That means a wide margin between a dose that’s effective and one that’s toxic. But it’s so powerful it has to be administered by experts. The difference between a good dose and a deadly one can’t be detected by the naked eye.’

  ‘Isn’t it marvelous,’ Alice said, ‘how much you learn on this job?’

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ Mort said, ‘because now the two of you have to get to work right away and write this up for the Extra.’

  ‘Oh, now you want us to do it? I thought you said you—’

  ‘You two did the research – you understand it now. Common sense says you should write the analysis the readers expect from us.’

  ‘But why today? We could come in early tomorrow and—’

  ‘The printer says on Monday he’s got to make signs and stickers for a hockey home game and a football semi-final starting Tuesday. The only time he’s got available to print our Extra is tomorrow, and he can only do it then if he gets it by eight o’clock tonight.’

  ‘I see,’ Alice said. ‘Anybody want more coffee?’ It gave her a chance to turn away. The new bridge club she had joined was bringing an instructor to town tonight to polish their contract bridge skills. She had signed up to attend and was looking forward to the change of pace.

  Standing at the coffee console, cheeks aflame, she thought, I haven’t had my raise for twenty-four hours yet and already I’m working a twelve-hour shift on a weekend. She began composing the first sentence of a contract she was going to write and they would both sign, setting some limits on this Dickensian sweatshop.

  But as she poured the water, a second thought surfaced. This game I’m playing right now is more interesting than contract bridge, and the Guardian is the only place in town to play it.

  She fussed with the sugar packets a minute, to get her face neutral. No use letting Mort see her looking pleased.

  Not to worry – Mort wasn’t even looking at her. He had his feet on the desk and was leaning far back in his big padded chair, grinning and talking on the phone to somebody who must be saying something delightful. When he rang off, he banged his feet onto the floor, jumped up and raised both hands in the air with thumbs up.

  ‘Yes-s-s!’ he yelled. ‘The credits are starting to roll in!’ He had just been asked to give the luncheon address at the Elks Lodge on Tuesday, and he was not even trying to conceal how pleased he was. ‘Good timing, too,’ he told them. ‘We’ve only got an exclusive hold on this autopsy report until Monday noon, so we’ll put our Extra out on Monday morning. That leaves me Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning to prepare my talk while you two finish the regular edition.’

  Stuart said, ‘You’re sure it’s OK with the sheriff, this exclusive deal?’

  ‘Absolutely. He came to me asking to put this print job on a tab, because his department is busted after all the extra expenses from the fire. I said, “Have I got a deal for you.”’

  ‘What if the city council gets on his case about playing favorites, putting the Guardian ahead of out-of-town papers?’

  ‘He’s going to say, “Give me a bigger office budget and I’ll promise never to do it again.” Tasker’s been elected sheriff four times in a row. He knows his constituents aren’t going to punish him for making do in an emergency.’

  So they drank another coffee and got down to it. Stuart and Alice had worked so many stories together by now that they functioned smoothly as a team. It was still a long afternoon of hard work, though, Stuart fact-checking and spell-checking ahead of her, she following him through the autopsy explanation, turning the raw data of their notes into acceptable prose. They were working on the last two pages when Mort came out of his office, planted his feet in a wide stance and said, ‘Speaking of budgets—’

  ‘Which we are not going to do at this time,’ Stuart said. ‘It’s five o’clock on a Saturday and we’ve already done two days’ work today. Be reasonable, Mort.’

  ‘I will. I am. Just let me say this out loud once, because I got an idea how to pay for this Extra we’re printing and I don’t want to let it get away.’

  ‘Two minutes,’ Stuart said, ‘and then I’m putting in my earbuds.’

  Good, showing some spunk for once, Alice thought. For a minute, he almost looked like his father.

  ‘OK, just listen. You’ve pretty well filled up the ad space for Thursday’s paper, haven’t you?’

  ‘Just about, yeah.’

  ‘Then here’s how we’ll pay for the free special edition. Call the merchants who made the ten biggest ad buys for Thursday and sell them a two-fer. For fifty percent more, they can have the same ad in the Extra. I was thinking of running it ad-free, but why throw away a chance to break even?’ He winked at Stuart. ‘Tell them they’ll be putting their brand on a chunk of Montana history at a bargain price. Think you can do that?’

  ‘Sure,’ Stuart said. He flashed his most confident smile. ‘Why not? No sweat.’

  ‘Good. While you do that, I’ll work on my speech for Tuesday and Alice can finish up all that puttering crap for the regular edition – the church notices, city council meeting, social news, wedding notices – you know the drill.’ He rubbed his cheeks, pleased with himself. His eyes rested on Alice for a few seconds before he asked her, ‘Think you can make time to help me with my speech?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll be able to think of plenty to say,’ she said, ‘but yes, when you get it ready I’ll check it over if you like.’

  She had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy, so she tackled the church and club notices early on Monday. She resisted the temptation to trade book and movie chat with Lila at the episcopal rectory and noted the bingo winners at Saint Francis Catholic without letting Louella get started on politics. The telephone gods were on her side that day, too. People actually answered their phones and had their notes where they could find them. So she had city council and Chamber of Commerce items on her desk before lunch, as well as book and social clubs.

  Usually she treated herself to a chapter of whatever book she was reading while she enjoyed her bag lunch. Today, feeling an undertone of urgency, she checked the Farm & Ranch News section for typos while she ate her roast beef sandwich. Better get as far along as I can before … She didn’t want to put into words what she thought was going to happen.

  Mort had his office door closed, but she could see him through the glass sidelight, bent over his laptop. He was changing the position of his chair often and beginning to glance her way. She ate the last of her sandwich, brushed off crumbs, discarded the wrapping and stood up. Mort came out quietly and stood in front of her, looking more rumpled than usual, holding two sweaty pages, handwritten on a yellow legal pad.

  He looked at her shoulder as he said, ‘Think maybe you could buff this up a little?’

  ‘Sure.’ She kept her eyes on the second button of his suit jacket. ‘Give me a few minutes to read it before we talk, OK?’

  It was even worse than she had feared, full of lame clichés, coy self-promotion and two factual statements that were simply wrong. She read on, cringing. Honored to be with this splendid … So many old pals … Each and every one of us … Recent hair’s breadth escape … Our little weekly that could … my staff – my loyal comrades, if you will …

  My God, how will I ever … But watch
ing him suffer, something in her had shifted a little. This is hard for him, knowing he needs help and having to ask me of all people for it. She remembered Betsy’s voice saying, ‘The man is a bottomless pit of the need to be on top.’

  When she was ready, instead of calling, she walked into his office and sat down in front of his desk. ‘I think I see what you want to say,’ she said.

  ‘You do? Good.’ Everything in his face said, I wish to hell I did.

  Alice opened the folder she’d brought in and revealed three double-spaced pages of notes. She picked up the top one and said, ‘These are just suggestions, of course – you can shape them to suit yourself, but … I know you want to say you’re proud to be the one they’ve asked to express the gratitude we all feel for our escape from the fire. This near-calamity has made us all realize we like our town a lot just as it is, don’t we?’ She looked at him, sweating into his old blue suit, and added, ‘That’s probably an applause line, so you’ll want to pause there a few seconds and give it a chance to build.’

  Mort wiggled with pleasure at the thought of applause.

  ‘And then you’ll certainly want to thank all the brave men and women firefighters who worked so hard to save us …’ she spread thanks liberally all over town, ‘… including the bankers who put up the money so the Guardian could take a turn at being a daily … That might get some more applause, come to think of it, and the bankers will love it. They hardly ever get to hear praise.’

  ‘Will you mark those places?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t let anybody see you wait for the clapping, though.’

  By Tuesday morning, they had enlisted Sven to scan the archives for old pictures of other remarkable events the Guardian had covered. Alice summarized the stories that accompanied the pictures and Stuart, after checking to be sure the Elks Lodge had a projector and a screen, made a PowerPoint presentation incorporating the speech, a few of the raging-inferno pictures and the best of the old photos. So Mort got a turn as a scholarly town historian, too. He looked taller by the time he marched out to lunch with his CD.

  ‘I hope he can remember how to run the clicker,’ Stuart said as they watched him go. ‘You’re smiling like a fond mom, you know that?’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to see him happy for once, isn’t it?’

  They both ate quick lunches and got back to work. Stuart was painfully selling the two-fer ads that he had said would be no sweat. ‘It’s lucky I got interested in journalism,’ he said as the afternoon wore on. ‘I’d have starved to death as a salesman.’

  Alice had no time to sympathize; she had a big job of editing to do. Elmer, the new kid Mort had hired to help Sven, was making the usual trek to fame and glory at the Guardian – besides sweeping the floor and delivering orders, he now covered some sports events, including Monday night basketball. Admirably prompt, he turned in his copy first thing Tuesday morning. He was a fan who loved the game and reported it accurately, in sentences so badly spelled and punctuated as to be nearly impenetrable.

  The one good thing about editing Elmer, Alice had learned, was that he truly did not care if she changed every blinking word, as long as she left the scores and the names of the plays and the players alone. He was a systems guy who thought the things he was good at – gadgets and games – were the things that mattered in the twenty-first century. He was just waiting for these book-reading troglodytes to catch up. Alice did her best to translate his mangled sentences and emoticons into prose that could be understood by their readers, and Elmer never complained.

  Mort came back from lunch incandescent with happiness. He had been interrupted by applause several times and had two more speaking engagements in the near future.

  He was quite willing to help with layout on the Extra they were composing – in fact, he insisted on doing so. Right now, he didn’t want to be anyplace else on earth but hard at work on his own little weekly that could.

  Alice’s text was ready, so she transferred it to the layout screen and got ready to referee while the two men argued about where the ads should go. Stuart stopped stacking his orders suddenly and said, ‘Oh, shit, I made a mistake, though.’

  ‘What? What?’ Mort said.

  ‘I got going too fast, I guess. You told me ten ads but I sold one too many. We don’t have space for eleven, do we? Rats, I’ll have to cancel one.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Mort said quickly. ‘We’ll find a way to make it work.’ At the composing screen, he made little humming noises for five minutes. ‘We’ll reduce the font one size on the whole issue – it isn’t noticeable if you do it to everything. Stuart, you’ll have to find a smaller picture for the used car ad – and for the fur-lined boots on the Campion’s ladies’ wear section. Alice, delete about four hundred words from the story.’

  ‘Four hun— That’s almost ten percent!’

  ‘Eight percent, actually. Take out some adverbs – that’s what you always tell the rest of us.’

  ‘What adverbs? Mort, this is bare bones now.’

  ‘Alice, you’ve got fifty minutes to get rid of four hundred words. Eight words a minute. Better get started.’

  Alice went back to her workspace, muttering, ‘Big whoop that you’re good at math. It’s not going to make any sense if I …’ She cut most of the preamble about the fire and began shrinking the report.

  To her surprise, the story did still make sense. In fact, it kept getting better the more she tightened it. She wiggled on her stool and muttered, ‘Think I just taught myself a lesson.’

  Mort looked up absently with raised eyebrows, but she waved one hand and said, ‘Nothing. Just thinking.’ The old slave driver has had enough free grins for one day.

  The clock seemed to have picked up speed, though. When she had eliminated about three hundred and fifty words, Stuart said, ‘We’re close. What if we made the drugstore ad an oval?’

  ‘Let’s see.’ Mort’s cursor danced around the screen. ‘Yes, that’ll work … I can wrap this little piece of text around here and look, we saved two whole lines at the bottom …’ He cut and pasted the end of Alice’s story around Stuart’s oval and Alice said, ‘Hey, it looks like …’

  ‘Almost. Two words left over,’ Mort said.

  Alice said, ‘Take out “subsequent” and make it “next.” Right there, see? Then cut that next sentence in two. If you take out the “and” …’

  Together, they all said softly, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Isn’t it marvelous,’ Stuart said, ‘the things you learn on this job?’

  SIXTEEN

  The note on the kitchen table was in his mother’s handwriting and read, Jason, I have to stop for groceries so I’ll be a few minutes late tonight. Cookies and fruit in the pantry if you get hungry, but don’t eat too much – we’re having spaghetti with that red sauce you like.’ She signed it M, with a flourish.

  Like anybody else could possibly be leaving that note. Jason knew his mother yearned for the affectionate friendship they had shared during his childhood. As he withheld it, her attempts to recapture it grew more pathetic and his contempt for her increased. She couldn’t seem to get it through her head that he was not coming out from behind the wall anymore.

  He had started the wall in first grade, the morning his mother said, ‘Doesn’t Jason look nice in his new sweater?’ His father had looked up and answered, ‘Yes, indeed he does.’ Then, with his special, ironic smile, the one he seemed to save for Jason, he added, ‘Just be sure you keep that big wet thumb out of sight, pal. If the other kids see it they’ll know you still suck it.’

  It had probably started earlier, but that was the day he remembered knowing that he needed a shelter where he could hide from his father’s sarcasm. He’d already learned to tell from Lyle’s face – there was a way his lip curled – when the next words out of his mouth would sting. But that was too late; he couldn’t get the wall up that fast. So, before he was seven, he’d learned to tune out pretty much everything his father said.

  When he saw how well the wall fen
ded off his father, he began adding to it, gradually getting it high and thick enough to keep out his sisters and most of his classmates. But the effort to keep it up there gave him a couple of facial tics and a slight stammer, and when kids began to mock those traits he built the wall higher and thicker. Now it surrounded him and blocked out most of the world, his father and sisters entirely, his mother most of the time, and everything at school except math and science.

  He didn’t fight anybody openly. He just maneuvered silently around people and managed not to hear most of what they said. His teachers speculated quietly about Asperger’s syndrome. But they saw at once, when they suggested a few tests to his parents, that testing was never going to fly with Jason’s father.

  ‘Ah, testing,’ Lyle said. ‘So much easier than teaching, isn’t it?’

  Jason let the wall down a little with the Gamers when he saw how they were bent on pleasure and pretty much ignored anything else – they all had walls of their own, in a way. Relaxing with people who could pass for friends got him the closest to happy he had been since he was small. Most of them had never shared a class with him, so they didn’t know how near to a non-person he could be in school. And they were all too self-absorbed and heedless to think much about peer behavior. So as Jason discovered the joys and hazards of adulthood, he did it apparently in the middle of his social group and surrounded by members of his family, but really alone, sharing details with nobody.

  So fine, his mom was going to get home a little late. His father was working the day shift and would not be home until six at least. His eldest sister was married and visited rarely on weekends; Janine, the middle child, had extended an ostensible gap year between high school and college to two years, was in a steady-dating phase with three or four young men, and treated the Underwood house like a large closet with snacking privileges. Unless she caught him rifling her room, which he was going to do first with one eye on the driveway, she was unlikely to notice him.